Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @10:06AM
from the sticks-and-stones dept.

British teenager Luke Angel has been banned from the US for sending an email to the White House calling President Obama an obscenity. The 17-year-old says he was drunk when he sent the mail and doesn't understand what the big deal is. "I don't remember exactly what I wrote as I was drunk. But I think I called Barack Obama a p***k. It was silly -- the sort of thing you do when you're a teenager and have had a few," he said. The FBI contacted local police who in turn confronted Luke and let him know that the US Department of Homeland Security didn't think his email was funny. "The police came and took my picture and told me I was banned from America forever. I don't really care but my parents aren't very happy," Angel said.

Please mod this troll down! He or She knows nothing of what they speak. Firearm possession/ownership laws very greatly by state/municipality.
I owned my first rifle at age 6 (registered in MY NAME) and my first pistol at age 12.

Yes guns are dangerous, yes they can kill, that is in fact their primary use. No sane person can argue against that fact.

However, there are quite a few more people (more than most think at least) that are responsible enough to teach their children well to NEVER point ANY WEAPON, loaded or otherwise, at ANYTHING they DON'T intend to KILL!!

It really is this simple:

1. Never point a weapon at something you don't intend to kill
2. Never hand a loaded weapon to anyone, always verify the chamber is open and no rounds are in the mag/clip/butt
3. When you do find something (non-human in all but self-defense/war situations) to point your gun at, know what lies at least 2 miles beyond your intended target, as you may in fact miss

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @05:50AM
from the who-called-in-de-fleet dept.

The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting:
"Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @06:46AM
from the this-will-go-over-well dept.

Following up on our discussion yesterday of annoying game distribution platforms, Ubisoft has announced the details of their Online Services Platform, which they will use to distribute and administer future PC game releases. The platform will require internet access in order to play installed games, saved games will be stored remotely, and the game you're playing will even pause and try to reconnect if your connection is lost during play. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"This seems like such a bizarre, bewildering backward step. Of course we haven't experienced it yet, but based on Ubi’s own description of the system so many concerns arise. Yes, certainly, most people have the internet all the time on their PCs. But not all people. So already a percentage of the audience is lost. Then comes those who own gaming laptops, who now will not be able to play games on trains, buses, in the park, or anywhere they may not be able to find a WiFi connection (something that’s rarely free in the UK, of course – fancy paying the £10/hour in the airport to play your Ubisoft game?). Then there's the day your internet is down, and the engineers can’t come out to fix it until tomorrow. No game for you. Or any of the dozens of other situations when the internet is not available to a player. But further, there are people who do not wish to let a publisher know their private gaming habits. People who do not wish to report in to a company they’ve no affiliation with, nor accountability to, whenever they play a game they’ve legally bought. People who don’t want their save data stored remotely. This new system renders all customers beholden to Ubisoft in perpetuity whenever they buy their games."

Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @03:22PM
from the you'll-have-this-ansi-terminal-and-like-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that manages an online database for the political market. We add to this DB daily with updates from a variety of sources and our customers then search through this content via our Solr/Lucene search engine. My problem is, our search interface is a little, well, basic and I would love to know if there are any feature-rich open source alternatives out there. The only one I can find is Flamenco, and while that seems strong on categorisation, that seems to be about the height of it."

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday January 04, 2010 @02:11PM
from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.

Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @06:55AM
from the understanding-is-too-much-effort dept.

Self Bias Resistor writes "According to a post on the Arcade-Museum forums, ASCAP is demanding an annual $800 licensing fee from at least one operator of a Guitar Hero Arcade machine, citing ASCAP licensing regulations regarding jukeboxes. An ASCAP representative allegedly told the operator that she viewed the Guitar Hero machine as a jukebox of sorts. The operator told ASCAP to contact Raw Thrills, the company that sells the arcade units. The case is ongoing and GamePolitics is currently seeking clarification of the story from ASCAP."

As long as you compare ALL life-cycle costs of EACH type of power plant, I could give a shit less how you stack them up. But coal, oil and natural gas, just don't magically show up at conventional power plants. They arrive there by the grace of OTHER FUCKING CARBON GENERATING PROCESSES, JUST LIKE NUCLEAR FUEL.

Ha! That's funny. So what, a few dozen machines at most? Try 500+ REGISTER systems, that had no outside comms with ANYTHING but a back office PC used for accounting, which already HAD AV on it. Now try updating those 500+ systems daily over a satellite link.

And just because I shouldn't do something, doesn't make it illegal to do so!!

People go on and on about the rights their society gives them without bothering to mention the responsibilities.

On this, we are in total agreement. But let us not forget that individuals are not the only ones with culpability. When our own president essentially says the "rule of law" doesn't apply to him or his staff, why should individuals be held to a higher standard. (yes, I know, straw-man, but still illustrative of the kind of brain dead thinking that allows these arguments to arise)

It's not that far a stretch to say that you have a responsibility to not wander around the President with a loaded gun or put the lives of the families of peace officers in danger.

As long as I'm abiding the law, I should be able to carry wherever I damn well please, as the 2nd amendment guarantees me that right. There is no law that says I can't be holding a loaded weapon within a specified distance of the president. Do I think you're example points out a situation in which it pays to err on the side of caution? Sure. However, by no means am I aware of any law that was broken.

Even if you knew for certain a cop was crooked, posting pictures of his house strikes me not only as obsessive, but also retributive without any court oversight, which is not what is supposed to happen in a society with the rule of law.

Another point we agree on. But you should have left out the 'court oversight' bit as there is never court oversight of vigilantism, and there are already laws on the books to deal with such crimes.

oh yeah, and quoting sanely appears to be hopelessly broken, even using paragraph or hard break tags,/code still munges my replies to the quote blocks...